Obama plays his first small business card with mystery appointment

Posted on | December 19, 2008 | 2 Comments

The announcement came down this afternoon: President-elect Barack Obama has named Karen Gordon Mills to be the next head muckety-muck of the Small Business Administration.

If you’re like the small business owners I’ve talked to since the news broke, along about now you may be saying, Who?

Ms. Mills is evidently a venture capital expert, having served as head of MMP Group, a private equity capital investor and advisor firm. She has also been serving on Obama’s SBA transition team.

Perhaps more to the point, from my perspective, is Why?

If I get a chance, I’m planning to call somebody and ask them that very question.

My first reaction is disappointment. After naming so many supremely qualified individuals to various posts in his Cabinet, I’m wondering exactly what the thinking was here. At first glance, it doesn’t appear that this woman could know very much about microbusinesses and, given her background, I worry that she may have a high-growth gazelle bias that will make her as deaf to the rest of us out here as so many others in Washington have always been.

That said, it has always been my practice to give people a chance. I’m not prepared to declare this appointment to be a disaster for microbusinesses. I don’t expect that she knows a thing about them coming into the job but maybe she will be willing to listen and learn. Maybe she will prove to be both accessible and educable, maybe she will be capable of having her horizons expanded.

Maybe she’ll turn out to be somebody for us to love.

(Pause for musical interlude … )

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Right now, that’s my hope. I’ll sit back, wait and see how she does. She makes all the right noises about small businesses — or, at least, she did during today’s announcement — but there wasn’t anything particularly insightful or even original in her remarks. And we’ve all heard “all the right noises” before, haven’t we?

It’s change but I don’t know that I believe in it yet. We’ll see.

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